The House of Seleucus

By Edwyn Bevan

The House of Seleucus, by noted historian Edwynt Bevan, chronicles the history of the Seleucid Empire, founded by Seleucus I Nicator following the death of Alexander the Great. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackmore Dennett
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9788832556223

Book preview

ARMY

HELLENISM IN THE EAST

It is a common phrase we hear—the unchangeable East. And yet nothing strikes the thoughtful traveller in the East more than the contrast between the present and a much greater past whose traces meet him at every turn. He seems to walk through an enormous cemetery. Everywhere there are graves—graves in the lonely hills, where there are no more living, graves not of persons only, but of cities; or again, there are cities not buried, whose relics protrude forlornly above ground like deserted bones. Beside the squalid towns, the nomads’ huts, the neglected fields of today are the vestiges of imperial splendour, of palaces and temples, theatres and colonnades, the feet of innumerable people. So utterly gone and extinct is that old world, so alien is the sordid present, that thetraveller might almost ask himself whether that is not a world out of all connection with this, whether that other race is not severed from the men he sees by some effacing deluge. And yet there is this very peculiarity in the sensations that a European traveler must experience at the sight of these things, that he becomes aware of a closer kinship between himself and some of these fragments of antiquity than exists between himself and the living people of the land. The ruins in question do not show him the character of some strange and enigmatic mind, like those of Egypt or Mexico, but the familiar classical forms, to which his eye has grown used in his own country, associated in his thought with the civilization from which his own is sprung. What do these things here, among people to whom the spirit that reared and shaped them is utterly unknown? The European traveler might divine in the history which lies behind them something of peculiar interest to himself. It is a part of that history which this book sets out to illuminate—the work accomplished by the dynasty of Seleucus in its stormy transit of the world’s stage two thousand years ago.

It is not so much the character of the kings which gives the house of Seleucus its peculiar interest. It is the circumstances in which it was placed. The kings were (to all intents and purposes) Greek kings; the sphere of their empire was in Asia. They were called to preside over the process by which Hellenism penetrated an alien world, coming into contact with other traditions, modifying them and being modified. Upon them that process depended. Hellenism, it is true, contained in itself an expansive force, but the expansion could hardly have gone far unless the political power had been in congenial hands. As a matter of fact, it languished in countries which passed under barbarian rule. It was thus that the Seleucid dynasty in maintaining itself was safeguarding the progress of Hellenism. The interest with which we follow its struggles for aggrandizement and finally for existence does not arise from any peculiar nobility in the motives which actuate them or any exceptional features in their course, but from our knowing what much larger issues are involved. At the break-up of the dynasty we see peoples of non-Hellenic culture, Persians, Armenians, Arabs, Jews, pressing in everywhere to reclaim what Alexander and Seleucus had won. They are only checked by Hellenism finding a new defender in Rome. The house of Seleucus, however feeble and disorganized in its latter days, stood at any rate in the breach till Rome was ready to enter on the heritage of Alexander.

But what does one mean by Hellenism?

That characteristic which the Greeks themselves chiefly pointed to as distinguishing them from barbarians was freedom. The barbarians, they said, or at any rate the Asiatics, were by nature slaves. It was a proud declaration. It was based upon a real fact. But it was not absolutely true. Freedom had existed before the Greeks, just as civilization had existed before them. But these two had existed only in separation. The achievement of the Greeks is that they brought freedom, and civilization into union.

ELEUTHERIA WHAT was the special gift of Greece to the world? The answer of the Greeks themselves is unexpected, yet it is as clear as a trumpet :Eleutheria, Freedom. The breath of Eleutheria fills the sail of Aeschylus’ great verse, it blows through the pages of Herodotus, awakens fierce regrets in Demosthenes and generous memories in Plutarch. Art, philosophy, science, the Greeks say, yes, we have given all these; but our best gift, from which all the others were derived, was Eleutheria.

Now what did they mean by that?

They meant the Reign of Law.

Aeschylus says of them in The Persians :

ATOSSA. Who is their shepherd over them and lord of their host?

CHORUS. Of no man are they called the slaves or subjects.

Now hear Herodotus amplifying and explaining Aeschylus. For though they are free, yet are they not free in all things. For they have a lord over them, even Law, whom they fear far more than thy people fear thee. At least they do what that lord biddeth them, and what he biddeth is still the same, to wit that they flee not before the face of any multitude in battle, but keep their order and either conquer or die. It is Demaratos that speaks of the Spartans to King Xerxes.

Eleutheria the Reign of Law or Nomos. The word Nomos begins with the meaning custom or convention, and ends by signifying that which embodies as far as possible the universal and eternal principles of justice. To write the history of it is to write the history of Greek civilization. The best we can do is to listen to the Greeks themselves explaining what they were fighting for in fighting for Eleutheria. They will not put us off with abstractions.

No one who has read The Persians forgets the live and leaping voice that suddenly cries out before the meeting of the ships at Salamis : Onward, Sons of the Hellenes! Free your country, free your children, your wives, your fathers’ tombs and seats of your fathers’ gods! All hangs now on your fighting!. This, then, when it came to action, is what the Greeks meant by the Reign of Law. It will not stem so puzzling if you put it in this way : that what they fought for was the right to govern themselves. Here as elsewhere we may observe how the struggle of Greek and Barbarian fills with palpitating life such words as Freedom, which to dull men have been apt to seem abstract and to sheltered people faded. For the Barbarians had not truly laws at all. How are laws possible where all are slaves save one, and he responsible to nobody? So the fight for Freedom becomes a fight for Law, that no man may become another’s master, but all be subject equally to the Law, whose service is perfect freedom.

That conception was wrought out in the stress of conflict with the Barbarians, culminating in the Persian danger. On that point it is well to prepare our minds by an admission. The quarrel was never a simple one of right and wrong. Persia at least was in some respects in advance of the Greece she fought at Salamis; and not only in material splendour. That is now clear to every historian; it never was otherwise to the Greeks themselves. Possessing or possessed by the kind of imagination which compels a man to understand his enemy, they saw much to admire in the Persians their hardihood, their chivalry, their munificence, their talent for government. The Greeks heard with enthusiasm (which was part at least literary) the scheme of education for young nobles to ride a horse, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth!. In fact the two peoples, although they never realized it, were neither in race nor in speech very remote from one another. But it was the destiny of the Persians to succeed to an empire essentially Asiatic and so to become the leaders and champions of a culture alien to Greece and to us. In such a cause their very virtues made them the more dangerous. Here was no possible compromise. Persia and Greece stood for something more than two political systems; the European mind, the European way of thinking and feeling about things, the soul of Europe was at stake. There is no help for it; in such a quarrel we must take sides.

Let us look first at the Persian side. The phrase I quoted about all men in Persia being slaves save one is not a piece of Greek rhetoric; it was the official language of the empire. The greatest officer of state next to the King was still his slave and was so addressed by him. The King was lord and absolute. An inscription at Persepolis reads I am Xerxes the Great King, the King of Kings, the King of many-tongued countries, the King of this great universe, the Son of Darius the King, the Achaemenid. Xerxes the Great King saith : By grace of Ahuramazda I have made this portal whereon are depicted all the countries."

The Greek orator Aeschines says, He writes himself Lord of men from the rising to the setting sun. The letter of Darius to Gadatas it exists today is addressed by Darius the son of Hystaspes, King of Kings. That, as we know, was a favourite title. The law of the land was summed up in the sentence : The King may do what he pleases. Greece saved us from that.

No man might enter the sacred presence without leave. Whoever was admitted must prostrate himself to the ground. The emperor sat on a sculptured throne holding in his hand a sceptre tipped with an apple of gold. He was clad in gorgeous trousers and gorgeous Median robe. On his head was the peaked kitaris girt with the crown, beneath which the formally curled hair flowed down to mingle with the great beard. He had chains of gold upon him and golden bracelets, a golden zone engirdled him, from his ears hung rings of gold. Behind the throne stood an attendant with a fan against the flies and held his mouth lest his breath should touch the royal person. Before the throne stood the courtiers, their hands concealed, their eyelids stained with kohl, their lips never smiling, their painted faces never moving. Greece saved us from all that.

The King had many wives and a great harem of concubines one for each day of the year. You remember the Book of Esther. Ahasuerus is the Greek Xerxes. There is in Herodotus a story of that court which, however unauthentic it may be in details, has a clear evidential value. On his return from Greece Xerxes rested at Sardis, the ancient capital of Lydia. There he fell in love with the wife of his brother Masistes. Unwilling to take her by force, he resorted to policy. He betrothed his son Darius to Artaynte, the daughter of Masistes, and took her with him to Susa (the Shushan of Esther), hoping to draw her mother to his great palace there, where were white, green and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble. In Susa, however, the King experienced a new sensation and fell in love with Artaynte who returned his affection. Now Amestris the Queen had woven with her own hands a wonderful garment for her lord, who inconsiderately put it on to pay his next visit to Artaynte. Of course Artaynte asked for it, of course in the end she got it, and of course she made a point of wearing it. When Amestris heard of this, she blamed, says Herodotus, not the girl but her mother. With patient dissimulation she did nothing until the Feast of the Birthday of the King, when he cannot refuse a request. Then for her present she asked the wife of Masistes. The King, who understood her purpose, tried to save the victim; but too late. Amestris had in the meanwhile sent the King’s soldiers for the woman; and when she had her in her power she cut away her breasts and threw them to the dogs, cut off her nose and ears and lips and tongue, and sent her home.

It may be thought that the Persian monarchy cannot fairly be judged by the conduct of a Xerxes. The reply to this would seem to be that it was Xerxes the Greeks had to fight. But let us choose another case, Artaxerxes II, whose life the gentle Plutarch selected to write because of the mildness and democratic quality which distinguished him from others of his line. Yet the Life of Artaxerxes would be startling in a chronicle of the Italian Renaissance. The story which I will quote from it was probably derived from the Persian History of Ktesias, who was a Greek physician at the court of Artaxerxes. This Ktesias, as Plutarch himself tells us, was a highly uncritical person, but after all, as Plutarch goes on to say, he was not likely to be wrong about things that were happening before his eyes. Here then is the story, a little abridged.

She, that is, Parysatis, the queen-mother, perceived that he, Artaxerxes, the King, had a violent passion for Atossa, one of his daughters. When Parysatis came to suspect this, she made more of the child than ever, and to Artaxerxes she praised her beauty and her royal and splendid ways. At last she persuaded him to marry the maid and make her his true wife, disregarding the opinions and laws (Nomoi) of the Greeks; she said that he himself had been appointed by the god (Ahuramazda) a law unto the Persians and judge of honour and dishonour. Atossa her father so loved in wedlock that, when leprosy had overspread her body, he felt no whit of loathing thereat, but praying for her sake to Hera (Anaitis?) he did obeisance to that goddess only, touching the ground with his hands; while his satraps and friends sent at his command such gifts to the goddess that the whole space between the temple and the palace, which was sixteen stades (nearly two miles) was filled with gold and with silver and with purple and with horses.

Artaxerxes afterwards took into his harem another of his daughters. The religion of Zarathustra sanctioned that. It also sanctioned marriage with a mother. According to Persian notions both Xerxes and Artaxerxes behaved with perfect correctness. The royal blood was too near the divine to mingle with baser currents. There is no particular reason for believing that Xerxes was an exceptionally vicious person, while Artaxerxes seemed comparatively virtuous. It was the system that was all wrong. What are you to expect of a prince, know- ing none other law than his own will, and surrounded from his infancy by venomous intriguing women and eunuchs? Babylon alone used to send five hundred boys yearly to serve as eunuchs. I think we may now leave the Persians.

Hear again Phocylides : A little well-ordered city on a rock is better than frenzied Nineveh. The old poet means a city of the Greek type, and by well- ordered he means governed by a law which guarantees the liberties of all in restricting the privileges of each. This, the secret of true freedom, was what the Barbarian never understood. Sperthias and Boulis, two rich and noble Spartans, offered to yield themselves up to the just anger of Xerxes, whose envoys had been flung to their death in a deep water-tank. On the road to Susa they were entertained by the Persian grandee Hydarnes, who said to them : Men of Sparta, wherefore will ye not be friendly towards the King? Beholding me and my condition, ye see that the King knoweth how to honour good men. In like manner ye also, if ye should give yourselves to the King (for he deemeth that ye are good men), each of you twain would be ruler of Greek lands given you by the King. They answered : Hydarnes, thine advice as touching us is of one side only, whereof thou hast experience, while the other thou hast not tried. Thou understandest what it is to be a slave, but freedom thou hast not tasted, whether it be sweet or no. For if thou shouldst make trial of it, thou wouldest counsel us to fight for it with axes as well as spears!

So when Alexander King of Macedon came to Athens with a proposal from Xerxes that in return for an alliance with them he would grant the Athenians new territories to dwell in free, and would rebuild the temples he had burned; and when the Spartan envoys had pleaded with them to do no such thing as the King proposed, the Athenians made reply. We know as well as thou that the might of the Persian is many times greater than ours, so that thou needest not to charge us with forgetting that. Yet shall we fight for freedom as we may. To make terms with the Barbarian seek not thou to persuade us, nor shall we be persuaded. And now tell Mardonios that Athens says : So long as the sun keeps the path where now he goeth, never shall we make compact with Xerxe ; but shall go forth to do battle with him, putting our trust in the gods that fight for us and in the mighty dead, whose dwelling-places and holy things he hath contemned and burned with fire.

This was their answer to Alexander; but to the Spartans they said:

The prayer of Sparta that we make not agreement with the Barbarian was altogether pardonable. Yet, knowing the temper of Athens, surely ye dishonour us by your fears, seeing that there is not so much gold in all the world, nor any land greatly exceeding in beauty and goodness, for which we would consent to join the Mede for the enslaving of Hellas. Nay even if we should wish it, there be many things preventing us : first and most, the images and shrines of the gods burned and cast upon an heap, whom we must needs avenge to the utmost rather than be consenting with the doer of those things; and, in the second place, there is our Greek blood and speech, the bond of common temples and sacrifices and like ways of life, if Athens betrayed these things, it would not be well.

When I was writing about Greek simplicity I should have remembered this passage. But our present theme is the meaning of Eleutheria. Our first duty, say the Athenians, is to avenge our gods and heroes, whose temples have been desecrated. Such language must ring strangely in our ears until we have reflected a good deal about the character of ancient religion. To the Greeks of Xerxes’ day religion meant, in a roughly comprehensive phrase, the consecration of the citizen to the service of the State. When the Athenians speak of the gods and heroes, whose temples have been burned, they are thinking of the gods and heroes of Athens, which had been sacked by the armies of Mardonios; and they are thinking chiefly of Athena and Erechtheus.

Now who was Athena? You may read in books that she was the patron-goddess of Athens. But she was more than that; she was Athens. You may read that she represented the fortune of Athens; but indeed she was the fortune of Athens. You may further read that she embodied the Athenian ideal; which is true enough, but how small a portion of the truth! It was not so much what Athens might become, as what Athens was, that moulded and impassioned the image of the goddess. It was the city of today and yesterday that filled the hearts of those Athenians with such a sense of loss and such a need to avenge their Lady of the Acropolis. For that which had been the focus of the old city-life, the dear familiar temple of their goddess, was a heap of stones and ashes mixed with the carrion of the old men who had remained to die there.

As for Erechtheus, he was the great Athenian hero. The true nature of a hero is an immensely controversial matter; but what we are concerned with here is the practical question, what the ancients thought. They, rightly or wrongly, normally thought of their heroes as famous ancestors. It was as their chief ancestor that the Athenians regarded and worshipped Erechtheus. Cecrops was earlier, but for some reason not so worshipful; Theseus was more famous, but later, and even something of an alien, since he appears to come originally from Troezen. Thus it was chiefly about Erechtheus as the father of his people, rather than about maiden Athena, that all that sentiment, so intense in ancient communities, of the common blood and its sacred obligations entwined itself. This old king of primeval Athens claimed his share of the piety due to the dead of every household, an emotion of so powerful a quality among the unsophisticated peoples that some have sought in it the roots of all religion. It is an emotion hard to describe and harder still to appreciate. Erechtheus was the Son of Earth, that is, really, of Attic Earth; and on the painted vases you see him, a little naked child, being received by Athena from the hands of Earth, a female form half hidden in the ground, who is raising him into the light of day. The effect of all this was to remind the Athenians that they themselves wereautochthones, born of the soil, and Attic Earth was their mother also. Not only her spiritual children, you understand, nor only fed of her bounty, but very bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Ge Kourotrophos they called her, Earth the Nurturer of our Children. Unite all these feelings, rooted and made strong by time : love of the City (Athena), love of the native and mother Earth (G), love of the unforgotten and unforgetting dead (Erechtheus) unite all these feelings and you will know why the defence of so great sanctities and the avenging of insult against them seemed to Athenians the first and greatest part of Liberty.

So Themistocles felt when after Salamis he said : It is not we who have wrought this deed, but the gods and heroes, who hated that one man should become lord both of Europe and of Asia; unholy and sinful, who held things sacred and things profane in like account, burning temples and casting down the images of the gods; who also scourged the sea and cast fetters upon it.

And it is this feeling which gives so singular a beauty and charm to the story of Dikaios.

Dikaios the son of Theokydes, an Athenian then in exile and held in reputation among the Persians, said that at this time, when Attica was being wasted by the footmen of Xerxes and was empty of its inhabitants, it befell that he was with Demaratos in the Thriasian Plain, when they espied a pillar of dust, such as thirty thousand men might raise, moving from Eleusis. And as they marvelled what men might be the cause of the dust, presently they heard the sound of voices, and it seemed to him that it was the ritual-chant to Iacchus. Demaratos was ignorant of the rites that are performed at Eleusis, and questioned him what sound was that. But he said, Demaratos, of a certainty some great harm will befall the host of the King. For this is manifest, there being no man left in Attica, that these are immortal Voices proceeding from Eleusis to take vengeance for the Athenians and their allies. And if this wrathful thing descend on Peloponnese, the King himself and his land army will be in jeopardy; but if it turn towards the ships at Salamis, the King will be in danger of losing his fleet. This is that festival which the Athenians hold yearly in honour of the Mother and the Maid, and every Athenian, or other Greek that desires it, receives initiation; and the sound thou hearest is the chanting of the initiates.

Demaratos answered, Hold thy peace, and tell no man else this tale. For if these thy words be reported to the King, thou wilt lose thine head, and I shall not be able to save thee, I nor any other man. But keep quiet and God will deal with this host. Thus did he counsel him. And the dust and the cry became a cloud, and the cloud arose and moved towards Salamis to the encampment of the Greeks. So they knew that the navy of Xerxes was doomed.

Athena, the Mother-Maid Demeter-Persephone with the mystic child Iacchus, Boreas the son-in-law of Erechtheus, whose breath dispersed the enemy ships under Pelion and Kaphareus of such sort are the gods who fight for us and claim the love and service of Athens in return. It is well to remember attentively this religious element in ancient patriotism, so large an element that one may say with scarcely any exaggeration at all that for the ancients patriotism was a religion. Therefore is Eleutheria, the patriot’s ideal, a religion too. Such instincts and beliefs are interwoven in one sacred indissoluble bond uniting the Gods and men, the very hills and rivers of Greece against the foreign master. Call this if you will a mystical and confused emotion; but do not deny its beauty or underestimate its tremendous force.

But here (lest in discussing a sentiment which may be thought confused we ourselves fall into confusion) let us emphasize a distinction, which has indeed been already indicated. Greek patriotism was as wide as Greece; but on the other hand its intensity was in inverse ratio to its extension. Greek patriotism was primarily a local thing, and it needed the pressure of a manifest national danger to lift it to a wider outlook. That was true in the main and of the average man, although every generation produced certain superior spirits, statesmen or philosophers, whose thought was not particularist. It was this home-savour which gave to ancient patriotism its special salt and pungency. When the Athenians in the speech I quoted say that their first duty is to avenge their gods, they are thinking more of Athens than of Greece. They are thinking of all we mean by home, save that home for them was bounded by the ring-wall of the city, not by the four walls of a house.

The wider patriotism of the nation the Greeks openly or in their hearts ranked in the second place. Look again at the speech of the Athenians. First came Athens and her gods and heroes their fathers’ gods; next To Hellenikon, that whereby they are not merely Athenians but Hellenes community of race and speech, the common interest in the national gods and their festivals, such as Zeus of Olympia with the Olympian Games, the Delphian Apollo with the Pythian Games. Of course this Hellenic or Panhellenic interest was always there, and in a sense the future lay with it; but never in the times when Greece was at its greatest did it supplant the old intense local loyalties. The movement of Greek civilization is from the narrower to the larger conception of patriotism, but the latter ideal is grounded in the former. Greek love of country was fed from local fires, and even Greek cosmopolitanism left one a citizen, albeit a citizen of the world. So it was with Eleutheria, which enlarged itself in the same sense and with an equal pace.

This development can be studied best in Athens, which was the Hellas of Hellas. One finds in Attic literature a passionate Hellenism combined with a passionate conviction that Hellenism finds its best representative in Athens. The old local patriotism survives, but is nourished more and more with new ambitions. New claims, new ideals are advanced. One claim appears very early, if we may believe Herodotus that the Athenians used it in debate with the men of Tegea before the Battle of Plataea. The Athenians recalled how they had given shelter to the Children of Heracles when all the other Greek cities would not, for fear of Eurystheus; and how again they had rescued the slain of the Seven from the Theban king and buried them in his despite. On those two famous occasions the Athenians had shown the virtue which they held to be most characteristic of Hellenism and specially native to themselves, the virtue which they called philanthropy or the love of man. What Heine said of himself, the Athenians might have said : they were brave soldiers in the liberation-war of humanity.

There is a play of Euripides, called The Suppliant Women, which deals with the episode of the unburied dead at Thebes. The fragmentary Argument says :The scene is Eleusis. Chorus of Argive women, mothers of the champions who have fallen at Thebes. The drama is a glorification of Athens. The eloquent Adrastos, king of Argos, pleads the cause of the suppliant women who have come to Athens to beg the aid of its young king Theseus in procuring the burial of their dead. Theseus is at first disposed to reject their prayer, for reasons of State; he must consider the safety of his own people; when his mother Aithra breaks out indignantly. Surely it will be said that with unvalorous hands, when thou mightest have won a crown of glory for thy city, thou didst decline the peril and match thyself, ignoble labour, with a savage swine; and when it was thy part to look to helm and spear, putting forth thy might therein, wast proven a coward. To think that son of mine ah, do not so! Seest thou how Athens, whom mocking lips have named unwise, flashes back upon her scorners a glance of answering scorn? Danger is her element. It is the unadventurous cities doing cautious things in the dark, whose vision is thereby also darkened. And the result is that Theseus and his men set out against the great power of Thebes, defeat it and recover the bodies, which with due observance of the appropriate rites they inter in Attic earth.

To make the world safe for democracy is something; but Athens never found it safe, perhaps did not believe it could be safe. Ready to take risks, facing danger with a lifting of the heart . . . their whole life a round of toils and dangers . . . born neither themselves to rest nor to let other people. In such phrases are the Athenians described by their enemies.

A friend has said : I must publish an opinion which will be displeasing to most; yet (since I think it to be true) I will not withhold it. If the Athenians in fear of the coming peril had left their land, or not leaving it but staying behind had yielded themselves to Xerxes, none would have tried to meet the King at sea. And so all would have been lost. But as the matter fell out, it would be the simple truth to say that the Athenians were the saviours of Greece. The balance of success was certain to turn to the side they espoused, and by choosing the cause of Hellas and the preservation of her freedom it was the Athenians and no other that roused the whole Greek world save those who played the traitor and under God thrust back the King. And some generations later, Demosthenes, in what might be called the funeral oration of Eleutheria, sums up the claim of Athens in words whose undying splendour is all pride and glory transfiguring the pain of failure and defeat.

Let no man, I beseech you, imagine that there is anything of paradox or exaggeration in what I say, but sympathetically consider it. If the event had been clear to all men beforehand . . . even then Athens could only have done what she did, if her fame and her future and the opinion of ages to come meant anything to her. For the moment indeed it looks as if she had failed; as man must always fail when God so wills it. But had She, who claimed to be the leader of Greece, yielded her claim to Philip and betrayed the common cause, her honour would not be clear. . . . Yes, men of Athens, ye did right be very sure of that when ye adventured yourselves for the safety and freedom of all; yes, by your fathers who fought at Marathon and Plataea and Salamis and Artemision, and many more lying in their tombs of public honour they had deserved so well, being all alike deemed worthy of this equal tribute by the State, and not only (0 Aeschines) the successful, the victorious. . . .

Demosthenes was right in thinking that Eleutheria was most at home in Athens. Now Athens, as all men know, was a democracy; that is, the general body of the citizens (excluding the slaves and resident aliens) personally made and interpreted their laws. Such a constitution was characterized by two elements which between them practically exhausted its meaning; namely,autonomy or freedom to govern oneself by one’s own laws, and isonomy or equality of all citizens before the law. Thus Eleutheria, denned as the Reign of Law, may be regarded as synonymous with Democracy. The basis of the democrat ical constitution is Eleutheria, says Aristotle. This is common ground with all Greek writers, whether they write to praise or to condemn. Thus Plato humorously, but not quite good-humouredly, complains that in Athens the very horses and donkeys knocked you out of their way, so exhilarated were they by the atmosphere of Eleutheria. But at the worst he only means that you may have too much of a good thing. Eleutheria translated as unlimited democracy you may object to; Eleutheria as an ideal or a watchword never fails to win the homage of Greek men. Very early begins that sentimental republicanism which is the inspiration of Plutarch, and through Plutarch has had so vast an influence on the practical affairs of mankind. It appears in the famous drinking-catch beginning I will bear the sword in the myrtle-branch like Harmodios and Aristogeiton. It appears in Herodotus. Otanes the Persian (talking Greek political philosophy), after recounting all the evils of a tyrant’s reign, is made to say : But what I am about to tell are his greatest crimes : he breaks ancestral customs, and forces women, and puts men to death without trial. But the rule of the people in the first place has the fairest name in the world, isonomy, and in the second place it does none of those things a despot doeth. In his own person Herodotus writes. "It is clear not merely in one but in every instance how excellent a thing isequality. When the Athenians were under their tyrants they fought no better than their neighbours, but after they had got rid of their masters they were easily superior. Now this proves that when they were held down they fought without spirit, because they were toiling for a master, but when they had been liberated every man was stimulated to his utmost efforts in his own behalf. The same morning confidence in democracy shines in the reply of the constitutional king, Theseus, too to the herald in Euripides’ play asking for the tyrant of Athens. You have made a false step in the beginning of your speech, stranger, in seeking a tyrant here. Athens is not ruled by one man, but is free. The people govern by turns in yearly succession, not favouring the rich but giving him equal measure with the poor".

The naiveté of this provokes a smile, but it should provoke some reflection too. Why does the rhetoric of liberty move us so little? Partly, I think, because the meaning of the word has changed, and partly because of this new liberty we have a super-abundance. No longer does Liberty mean in the first place the Reign of Law, but something like its opposite. Let us recover the Greek attitude, and we recapture, or at least understand, the Greek emotion concerning Eleutheria.Jason says to Medea in Euripides’ play, Thou dwellest in a Greek instead, of a Barbarian land, and hast come to know Justice and the use of Law without favour to the strong. The most romantic hero in Greek legend recommending the conventions!

This, however, is admirably and characteristically Greek. The typical heroes of ancient story are alike in their championship of law and order. I suppose the two most popular and representative were Heracles and Theseus. Each goes up and down Greece and Barbary destroying hybristai, local robber-kings, strong savages, devouring monsters, ill customs and every manner of lawlessness and injustice. In their place each introduces Greek manners and government, Law and Justice. It was this which so attracted Greek sympathy to them and so excited the Greek imagination. For the Greeks were surrounded by dangers like those which Heracles or Theseus encountered. If they had not to contend with supernatural hydras and triple-bodied giants and half-human animals, they had endless pioneering work to do which made such imaginings real enough to them; and men who had fought with the wild Thracian tribes could vividly sympathize with Heracles in his battle with the Thracian king, Diomedes, who fed his fire-breathing horses with the flesh of strangers. Nor was this preference of the Greeks for heroes of such a type merely instinctive; it was reasoned and conscious. The mission of Heracles, for example, is largely the theme of Euripides’ play which we usually call Hercules Furens. A contemporary of Euripides, the sophist Hippias of Elis, was the author of a too famous apologue,The Choice of Heracles, representing the youthful hero making the correct choice between Laborious Virtue and Luxurious Vice.

Another Euripidean play, The Suppliant Women, as we have seen, reveals Theseus in the character of a conventional, almost painfully constitutional, sovereign talking the language of Lord John Russell. As for us, our sympathies are ready to flow out to the picturesque defeated monsters, the free Centaurs galloping on Pelion, the cannibal Minotaur lurking in his Labyrinth. But then our bridals are not liable to be disturbed by raids of wild horsemen from the mountains, nor are our children carried off to be dealt with at the pleasure of a foreign monarch. People who meet with such experiences get surprisingly tired of them. There is a figure known to mythologists as a Culture Hero. He it is who is believed to have introduced law and order and useful arts into the rude com- munity in which he arose. Such heroes were specially regarded, and the reverence felt for them measures the need of them. Thus in ancient Greece we read of Prometheus and Palamedes, the Finns had their Wainomoinen, the Indians of North America their Hiawatha. Think again of historical figures like Charlemagne and Alfred, like Solon and Numa Pompilius, even Alexander the Great. A peculiar romance clings about their names. Why? Only because to people fighting what must often have seemed a losing battle against chaos and night the institution and defence of law and order seemed the most romantic thing a man could do. And so it was.

Such a view was natural for them. Whether it shall seem natural to us depends on the fortunes of our civilization. On that subject we may leave the prophets to rave, and content ourselves with the observation that there are parts of Europe today in which many a man must feel himself in the position of Roland fighting the Saracens or Aetius against the Huns. As for ourselves, how-ever confident we may feel, we shall be foolish to be over-confident; for we are fighting a battle that has no end. The Barbarian we shall have always with us, on our frontiers or in our own breasts. There is also the danger that the prize of victory may, like Angelica, escape the strivers’ hands. Already perhaps the vision which inspires us is changing. I am not concerned to attack the character of that change but to interpret the Greek conception of civilization, merely as a contribution to the problem. To the Greeks, then, civilization is the slow result of a certain immemorial way of living. You cannot get it up from books, or acquire it by imitation; you must absorb it and let it form your spirit, you must live in it and live through it; and it will be hard for you to do this, unless you have been born into it and received it as a birth-right, as a mould in which you are cast as your fathers were. Oh, but we must be more progressive than that Well, we are not; on the contrary the Greeks were very much the most progressive people that ever existed intellectually progressive, I mean of course; for are we not talking about civilization?

The Greek conception, therefore, seems to work. I think it works, and worked, because the tradition, so cherished as it is, is not regarded as stationary. It is no more stationary to the Greeks than a tree, and a tree whose growth they stimulated in every way. It seems a fairly common error, into which Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton sometimes fall, for modern champions of tradition to over-emphasize its stability. There has always been the type of vinous, loudly singing, unsanitary men, which Mr. Wells has called the ideal of these two writers; he is the foundational type of European civilization. But it almost looks as if Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton were entirely satisfied with him. They want him to stay on his small holding, and eat quantities of ham and cheese, and drink quarts of ale, and hate rich men and politicians, and be perfectly parochial and illiterate. But Hellenism means, simply an effort to work on this sound and solid stuff ; it is not content to leave him as he is; it strives to develope him, but to develope him within 1 the tradition; to transform him from an Aristophanic demesman into an Athenian citizen. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton are Greek in this, that they have constantly the sense of fighting an endless and doubtful battle against strong enemies that would destroy whatever is most necessary to the soul of civilized men. Well I know in my heart and soul that sacred Ilium must fall, and Priam, and the folk of Priam with the good ashen spear . . . yet before I die will I do a deed for after ages to hear of!

We, like the Greeks, are apt to speak in our loose way of the Asiatic or the Oriental, reflecting on his servility, his patience, his reserve. But in so doing we lose sight of that other element in the East which presents in many ways the exact opposite of these characteristics. Before men had formed those larger groups which are essential to civilization they lived in smaller groups or tribes, and after the larger groups had been formed the tribal system in mountain and desert went on as before. We can still see in the East today many peoples who have not emerged from this stage.

The men of these primitive tribes are free. And the reason is plain. In proportion to the smallness of the group the individual has greater influence. Where the whole community can meet for discussion, the general sense is articulate and compulsive. The chronic wars between clan and clan make all the men fighters from their youth up. On the other hand civilization is promoted by every widening of intercourse, everything which fuses the isolated tribal groups, which resolves them in a larger body. The loss of freedom was the price which had to be paid for civilization.

It was in the great alluvial plains, where there are few natural barriers and a kind soil made life easy, along the Nile and the Euphrates, that men first coalesced in larger combinations, exchanging their old turbulent freedom for a life of peace and labor under the laws of a common master. The Egyptians and Babylonians had already reached the stage of civilization and despotism at the first dawn of history. But in the case of others a record of the transition remains. The example of the great kings who ruled on the Nile and the Euphrates set up a mark for the ambition of strong men among the neighboring tribes. The military power which resulted from the gathering of much people under one hand showed the tribes the uses of combination. Lesser kingdoms grew up in other lands with courts which copied those of Memphis and Babylon on a smaller scale.

The moment of transition is depicted for us in the case of Israel. Here we see the advantages of the tribal and the monarchical system deliberately weighed in the assembly of the people. On the one hand there is the great gain in order and military efficiency promised by a concentration of power: We will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles. On the other hand there is the sacrifice entailed upon the people by the compulsion to maintain a court, the tribute of body-service and property, the loss, in fact, of liberty.

By the time that Hellenism had reached its full development the East, as far as the Greeks knew it, was united under an Iranian Great King. The Iranian Empire had swallowed up the preceding Semitic and Egyptian Empires, and in the vast reach of the territory which the Persian king ruled in the fifth century before Christ he exceeded any potentate that this world had yet seen. He seemed to the Greeks to have touched the pinnacle of human greatness. And yet monarchy was a comparatively new thing among the Iranians. The time when they were still in the tribal stage was within memory. Even now the old tribal organization in Iran wan not done away; it was simply overshadowed by the preeminent power attained by the house of Achaemenes, whose conquests beyond the limits of Iran had given it the absolute disposal of vast populations. Tradition, reproduced for us by Herodotus, still spoke of the beginnings of kingship in Iran. The main features of that story are probably true; the ambition excited in Deioces the Mede after his people had freed themselves from the yoke of Assyria; the weariness of their intestine feuds, which made the Medes acquiesce in common subjection to one great man; the strangeness of the innovation when a Mede surrounded himself with the pomp and circumstance which imitated the court of Nineveh. After the False Smerdis was overthrown it was even seriously debated, Herodotus assures us, by the heads of the Persian clans, whether it would not be a good thing to abolish the kingship and choose, some form of association more consonant with ancestral customs, in which the tribal chiefs or the tribal assemblies should be the ruling authority.

As an alternative, then, to the rude freedom of primitive tribes, the world, up to the appearance of Hellenism, seemed to present only unprogressive despotism. Some of the nations, like the Egyptians and Babylonians, had been subject to kings for thousands of years. And during all that time there had been no advance. Movement there had been, dynastic revolutions, foreign conquests, changes of fashion in dress, in art, in religion, but no progress. If anything there had been decline. Between the king and his subjects the relation was that of master and slave. The royal officials were the king’s creatures, responsible to him, not to the people. He had at his command an army which gave him transcendent material power. Upon the people he made two main demands, and they on their part expected two main things from him. He took firstly their persons, when he chose, for his service, and secondly as much of their property as he thought good. And what they asked of him in return was firstly external peace, since he alone by his army could repel the foreign invader or the wild tribes of hill and desert, and secondly internal peace, which he secured by being, himself or through his deputies, the judge of their disputes.

It was under these circumstances that the character we now describe as Oriental was developed. To the husbandman or merchant it never occurred that the work of government was any concern of his; he was merely a unit in a great aggregate, whose sole bond of union was its subjection to one external authority; for him, while kings went to war, it was enough to make provision for himself and his children in this life, or make sure of good things in the next, and let the world take its way. It was not to be wondered at that he came to find the world uninteresting outside his own concerns—his bodily wants and his religion. He had to submit perforce to whatever violences or exactions the king or his ministers chose to put upon him; he had no defense but concealment; and he developed the bravery, not of action, but of endurance, and an extraordinary secretiveness. He became the Oriental whom we know.

Then with the appearance of Hellenism twenty-five centuries ago there was a new thing in the earth. The Greeks did not find themselves shut up to the alternative of tribal rudeness or cultured despotism. They passed from the tribal stage to a form of association which was neither the one nor the other—the city-state. They were not absolutely the first to develop the city-state; they had been preceded by the Semites of Syria. Before Athens and Sparta were heard of, Tyre and Sidon had spread their name over the Mediterranean. But it was not till the city-state entered into combination with the peculiar endowments of the Hellenes that it produced a new and wonderful form of culture.

The race among whom the city-state bore this fruit was not spread over rich plains, like those in which the older civilizations had their seat. It was broken into a hundred fragments and distributed among mountain valleys and islands. These natural divisions tended to withhold its groups from fusion, whilst the sea, which ran in upon it everywhere, in long creeks and bays, invited it to intercourse and enterprise. Under these circumstances the original tribal villages grouped themselves upon centres which constituted cities. For so large a number of men to enter upon so close cooperation as the city-state implied had not been possible under the old tribal system. But their doing so was a pre-requisite for that elaboration of life which we call civilized. At the same time the city was not too large for the general voice of its members to find collective expression. It was a true instinct which led the Greek republics to be above all things jealous of their independence to fret at any restraint by which their separate, sovereignty was sacrificed in some larger combination.

Hellenism, as that culture may most conveniently be called, was the product of the Greek city-state. How far it was due, to the natural aptitudes of the Greeks, and how far to the form of political association under which they lived, need not now be discussed. It will be enough to indicate the real connection between the form of the Greek state anti the characteristics which made Hellenism different from any civilization which before had been.

We may discern in Hellenism a moral and an intellectual side; it implied a certain type of character, and it implied a certain cast of ideas. It was of the former that the Greek was thinking when he distinguished himself as a free man from the barbarian. The authority he obeyed was not an external one. He had grown up with the consciousness of being the member of a free state, a state in which he had an individual value, a share in the sovereignty. This gave him a self-respect strange to those Orientals whom he smiled to see crawling prostrate before the thrones of their kings. It gave him an energy of will, a power of initiative impossible to a unit of those driven multitudes. It gave his speech a directness and simplicity which disdained courtly circumlocutions and exaggerations. It gave his manners a striking naturalness and absence of constraint.

But he was the member of a state. Freedom meant for him nothing which approached the exemption of the individual from his obligations to, and control by, the community. The life of the Greek citizen was dominated by his duty to the state. The state claimed him, body and spirit, and enforced its claims, not so much by external rewards and penalties, as by implanting its ideals in his soul, by fostering a sense of honor and a sense of obligation. Corruption and venality have always been the rule in governments of the Oriental pattern. The idea of the state as an object of devotion, operating on the main body of citizens and in the secret passages of their lives—this was a new thing in the Greek republics. It was this which gave force to the laws and savor to the public debates. It was this as much as his personal courage which made the citizen-soldier obey cheerfully and die collectedly in his place. It is easy to point to lapses from this ideal in the public men of ancient Greece; even Miltiades, Themistocles, and Demosthenes had not always clean hands. But no one would contend that the moral qualities which the free state tended to produce were universal among the Greeks or wholly absent among the barbarians. It is a question of degree. Without a higher standard of public honesty, a more cogent sense of public duty than an Oriental state can show, the free institutions of Greece could not have worked for a month.

The Hellenic character no sooner attained distinct being than the Greek attracted the attention of the older peoples as a force to be reckoned with. Kings became aware that a unique race of soldiers, upon which they could draw, had appeared. In fact, the first obvious consequence of the union of independence and discipline in the Greek, as it affected the rest of the world, was to make him the military superior of the men of other nations. At the very dawn of Greek history, in the seventh century B.C., Pharaoh Necho employed Greek mercenaries, and in recognition of their services (perhaps on that field where King Josiah of Judah fell) dedicated his corslet at a Greek shrine. The brother of the poet Alcaeus won distinction in the army of the king of Babylon. Under the later Egyptian kings the corps of Greek mercenaries counted for much more than the native levies. The Persian conquest, which overspread Western Asia in the latter part of the sixth century and the beginning of the fifth, was checked on Greek soil, and the armies of the Great King rolled back with appalling disaster. By the end of the century the Persians had come, like the Egyptians, to place their main reliance on Greek mercenaries. The superiority of the Greeks was displayed openly by the Ten Thousand and the campaigns of Agesilaus. From this time it was clear that if the Hellenic race could concentrate its forces in any political union it might rule the world.

Besides a certain type of character, a new intellectual type was presented by the Greeks. The imagination of the Greeks was perhaps not richer, their feeling not more intense than that of other peoples—in the religious sentiment, for instance, we might even say the Greek stood behind the Oriental; but the imagination and feeling of the Greeks were more strictly regulated. The Greek made a notable advance in seeing the world about him as it really was. He wanted to understand it as a rational whole. The distinguishing characteristic which marks all the manifestations of his mind, in politics, in philosophy, in art, is his critical faculty, his rationalism, or, to put the same thing in another way, his bent of referring things to the standard of reason and reality. He was far more circumspect than the Oriental in verifying his impressions. He could not always take a traditional opinion or custom for granted and rest satisfied with the declaration, So it was from the beginning,’’ or Such was the manner of our fathers." His mind was the more emancipated from the tyranny of custom that it might be the more subjected to the guidance of truth.

And here again we may see the influence of his political environment. There is nothing in a despotism to quicken thought; the obedience demanded is unreasoning; the principles of government are locked in the king’s breast. In a Greek city it was far otherwise. In the democracies especially the citizens were all their lives accustomed to have alternative policies laid before them in the Assembly, to listen to the pleadings in the law-courts, to follow opposed arguments. What one moment appeared true was presently probed and convicted of fallacy. Institutions were justified or impugned by reference to the large principles of the Beautiful or the Profitable. The Greek lived in an atmosphere of debate; the market-place was a school of gymnastic for the critical faculty. Plato could only conceive of the reasoning process as a dialogue.

Under these circumstances, in spite of the natural reverence for accepted custom and belief, in spite of the opposition of the more conservative tempers —an opposition which we still hear grumbling throughout Greek literature— the critical faculty came increasingly into play. It came into all spheres of activity as an abiding principle of progress. Of progress, as opposed to stagnation, because it held the established on its trial; of progress, as opposed to random movement, because it regulated the course of innovation. The state, in which this faculty operates, shows the characteristic of a living organism, continuous modification according to environment.

The critical faculty, the reason—in one light it appears as the sense of proportion; the sense of proportion in politics, common sense, balance of judgment; the sense of proportion in behavior, which distinguishes what is seemly for the occasion and the person concerned; the sense of proportion in art, which eliminates the redundant and keeps each detail in its due subordination to the whole. How prominent this aspect of the critical faculty was with the Greeks their language itself shows; reason and proportion are expressed by a common word. The Hellenes Polybius says, differ mainly in this respect from other men, that they keep to what is due in each case. Nothing in excess, is the most characteristic piece of Hellenic wisdom.

We have arrived at this, that the distinctive quality of the Hellenic mind is a rationalism, which on one side of it is a grasp of the real world, and on another side a sense of proportion. How true this is in the sphere of art, literary or plastic, no one acquainted with either needs to be told. We can measure the bound forward made in human history by the Greeks between twenty and twenty-five centuries ago if we compare an Attic tragedy with the dreary verbiage of the Avesta or the relics of Egyptian literature recovered from temple and tomb. Or contrast the Parthenon, a single thought in stone, a living unity exquisitely adjusted in all its parts, with the unintelligent piles of the Egyptians, mechanically uniform, impressive from bulk, from superficial ornaments and the indescribable charm of the Nile landscape.

But notable as were the achievements of the Greeks in the sphere of art, still more momentous for mankind